The library survives him

Karl Marx described Abraham Lincoln as one of the few men to have become great without ceasing to be good. I can think of another such: Lord Harris of High Cross, whose life was celebrated at St John's Smith Square yesterday.

"Great" is a word that is often brandished too readily, but few men have had such a benign and tangible impact on their country. Ralph did not care much for the expansion of the post-war British state. But, where a less hopeful man would have contented himself with grumbling, he was determined to remould the world around him into a more pleasing shape.

The extent to which he succeeded is one of the miracles of our age. It is already hard to recall how we lived as recently as the 1970s, with wage controls and price controls and rent controls and an economy directed by that Heatho-Wilsonite manticore the NECD ("like the mule", observed Ralph, "it has no pride of ancestry and no hope of offspring").

Lord Harris changed society, not by winning office – he believed that all electoral politics were, to some extent, corrosive – but by convincing people that he was right. "I haven't really said anything new since 1957," he told me shortly before he died, "but each generation has to learn for itself."

It was, ultimately, his influence – not just on Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe and Keith Joseph, but on dozens more whose names we have forgotten – that did for the idea that the gentlemen in Whitehall and Brussels know best.

Neil Hamilton, who has sometimes made me wince with his Rector of Stiffkey capers, gave a beautifully dignified address about the man who had stood by him as his career collapsed. Lords Howe and Tebbit acknowledged their intellectual debt to the economist who had swum most strongly against the current of opinion.

If you know Simon Heffer only through his columns in this newspaper, you may have formed the image of an irascible, sarcastic fellow; but you would, I promise, have been moved almost to tears by his recollection of the man who had inspired him as an undergraduate and taken a selfless interest in his career from then on.

It was a story that many of us recognised. Ralph Harris had a particular genius for engaging the interest of younger people; but it was the personality, as much as the ideas, that attracted us. We would treat him, for the rest of our lives, as a sort of political guru who was also a favourite uncle, proudly introducing our wives and children to him when they came onto the scene (the wives and children invariably adored him).

Ralph Harris was predeceased by both his sons, but he acquired hundreds of, as it were, surrogate children. The Spanish say that, when a wise man dies, it is as though a library had been burnt to the ground. But in Ralph's case, the library survives him, its volumes made up of all those whom he showed what it truly means to live in a free country.